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Want to learn more about our academic degree programs? Take a look at our Master of Divinity, Master of Arts, and Doctor of Ministry programs. Plus, learn about our unique Training & Mentoring program.

This Student Life section is the one-stop shop for students to get connected to activities that will feed your spiritual and social life as well as equip you with resources to jump-start your academic career.

Being a part of our Denver Seminary community is about connection. Whether you are an alumni, donor, or friend of the Seminary, we want to stay in touch and hope you'll take part in our programs and events.

Denver Seminary has a wealth of resources that are available to current students, alumni, and the local community. Here you will find access to the Denver Journal, Engage Magazine, and the various initiatives organized by the Seminary.

The
latest in IVP's series of New Testament dictionaries is the most
prodigious to date. After largely reviewing matters of introduction and
theology in the Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, the Dictionary of Paul and His Letters, and the Dictionary of Later New Testament and Its Developments,
now we have wide-ranging and masterful articles on just about any topic
of historical background one could imagine. Approximately 300 articles
from 150 contributors range from as few as 500 words to over 10,000 in
length.

All of the major Old Testament apocryphal and
pseudepigraphal books, along with many major and minor sectarian
documents from Qumran receive individual articles. So too does
Josephus, Philo and, treated in one article apiece, since they largely
postdate the New Testament, the apocryphal gospels, the apocryphal acts
and epistles, the Gnostic literature, and the Apostolic Fathers. The
Rabbinic literature is surveyed in four treatments-on midrashim,
Mishnah and Tosefta, targumim and Talmud. There are entries on genres
and forms of literature (e.g., apocalyptic, vice and virtue lists), as
well as rhetorical devices (e.g., diatribe).

Contributors and
topics well represent the explosion of social-scientific approaches to
the New Testament. One can learn about patronage and benefaction as
well as more well-known social institutions: marriage and the family,
children, women, slavery or friendship. Short articles treat
interesting sidelights such as banquets, circuses, and the arenas as
well as major social forces on ancient culture (e.g., education or
economics).

Almost every major Roman city and province
related in some way to the New Testament receives an article, many by
long time Wheaton professor John McRay, who also pens the overall
detailed study of archaeology. Major articles appear on numerous large
topics of philosophy, history, politics, literature, interpretation of
Scripture and scholarship more generally. under headings beginning
either with "Jewish," "Hellenistic" (or "Greek") or "Roman."

Occasionally
articles seem more theological than the rest, but even then background
issues come to the fore, as with the Holy Spirit, the Law or
resurrection. Special topics not as commonly studied by New Testament
students often have particularly useful surveys, as with art and
architecture, music and coinage.

A preponderance of
evangelical scholars punctuates the list of contributors, but the
editors do not hesitate to enlist experts on each topic regardless of
their theological persuasion. For example, Mormon BYU professor Stephen
Robinson writes on the pseudepigraphal apocalypses of Abraham and
Zephaniah. A number of the authors are world-class experts in their
areas (e.g., John Collins on apocalyptic and eschatology, David Aune on
Greco-Roman religion or Jacob Neusner on the Mishnah and Tosefta),
while many are newer scholars still in the process of making an impact
on their respective fields but with all the prospects of doing so
(e.g., Clayton Croy on Epicureanism and Neo-Pythagoreanism, Bruce Fisk
on the Rewritten Bible in Pseudepigrapha and Qumran and Wendy Porter on
creeds, hymns and music).

Not surprisingly, the two editors
and several of their colleagues at their respective institutions write
the largest number of articles: Craig Evans, long distinguished in the
field of Qumran research, along with fellow Trinity Western professors
in their Dead Sea Scrolls Institute, Martin Abegg and Peter Flint (and
Michael Wise who does not teach there), account for a substantial
majority of the articles on Qumran and its literature. In keeping with
his far more widely ranging interests and previous writings, Stan
Porter (husband of the aforementioned Wendy Porter) pens treatments of
topics as diverse as NT chronology, Greco-Roman festivals and holy
days; Greek grammar, inscriptions and papyri, Latin language, ancient
versions of the New Testament in languages other than Greek, the
Septuagint and textual criticism. Porter's junior colleague at the
University of Surrey in London, Brook Pearson, also contributes a
substantial number of shorter pieces with considerable acumen
(Alexander the Great, Antioch, Aristobulus, Associations, etc.).

Some
of the entries prove simply outstanding (e.g., Craig Keener's overviews
of adultery and divorce, family and household, friendship, marriage and
head coverings, replete with the voluminous references to primary
source material for which his scholarship has become known). Most are
very solid and informative, state-of-the art in coverage, ample in
bibliography and even-handed in assessing the evidence. Some represent
the drastic abridgment of book-length works (e.g., Scot McKnight on
Jewish proselytism); others reflect fresh research that could merit
expansion into book-length works (e.g., D. A. Carson on pseudonymity
and psuedepigraphy).

Occasionally an author will tout his
idiosyncratic perspective in a way that makes the article less what one
would expect in a reference work like a dictionary (e.g., Bruce Chilton
in his understanding of Jesus and the early church with respect to the
purity laws of Judaism). Interestingly, with a couple of Chilton's
articles and a handful of other pieces scattered throughout the volume,
the editors did not hesitate to compose additional paragraphs and
intersperse them throughout the articles with brackets at the end of
each author's section letting one know who wrote what.

Occasionally,
too, the choice of a scholar generates a perspective with which most
evangelicals would at least partially disagree; it is curious, for
example, why Harry Gamble was asked to write on the formation of the NT
canon or on literacy and book culture. The former article reads like
the product of the standard liberal consensus, which is significantly
flawed at several points; the latter is unaware of recent scholarship
(particularly by Alan Millard and Richard Bauckham) that provides
considerable evidence for a greater amount of literacy and use of books
in the first-century Roman empire than is usually suspected.

With
300 opportunities one can always quibble at the selection or omission
of a particular topic. Do we really need an individual article on Maria
the Jewish alchemist. How many New Testament scholars have ever heard
of Maria, I wonder? While other major Greco-Roman philosophies get
individual treatments there is no entry on the Sophists (despite Bruce
Winter's major recent work on that group). Are Tacitus and Suetonius
that much more important for NT interpretation that they deserve
individual articles when Herodotus and Thucydides do not? And why do we
read about "Kissing" and "Milk" in separate articles, good though they
are? (Love and water appear far more commonly in the New Testament, in
theologically loaded texts, but do not have discrete discussions
surrounding them.)

Perhaps more substantively, do so many of
the newly translated Dead Sea Scroll fragments, some so corrupt that we
are unsure even of their plots or contents in any detail, deserve
separate articles when several of the shorter works in Charlesworth's
standard two-volume translation of the pseudepigrapha are passed over
without comment? The editors' response no doubt would be that
pre-Christian datings are at best precarious with the latter, while the
new Qumran material has not yet received adequate coverage. And
overall, the choices of material do remain outstanding.

There
is also some inevitable repetition. The basic historical information
about Palestine from Alexander the Great to Herod the Great reappears
in varying lengths about a dozen times. But few readers will probably
ever read even a majority of this massive tome; they will simply look
up select entries, so that such repetition is probably necessary.

Abundant
cross-references do already appear within existing articles and between
entries, and a detailed subject index further ensures that the
persistent researcher should be able to find a discussion, even if
brief, of just about any topic relevant to this anthology, even if not
under the first heading she tries.

This big book, then, is a
one-stop-shopping reference tool for student, pastor and scholar alike
and should become a high priority in one's book-buying budget. It will
be a long time before anything of its magnitude, coverage, quality and
"up-to-dateness" comes along again, or before anything like it will
again be needed. An interesting closing sidelight is that one gets a
glimpse into how long this project has been in the works when one comes
across an article by Robert Guelich on the "Destruction of Jerusalem,"
updated by editor Evans, and recalls that Guelich passed away in the
early 1990s!